Abstract

The first art of photography best aligns with the production of photographers like Henri Cartier‐Bresson, Edward Weston, Andre Kertesz, and Diane Arbus. Modernism is the moniker that tends to be applied to these photographers and their peers in retrospect, usually by art historians, especially in connection with the writings of John Szarkowski. As curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York from the 1960s through the 1980s, Szarkowski commanded attention and used it to lead the cheer for modernist photography. A recurring theme of photography writing is that looking at photographs enables one to experience bits of the world that are distant in time or space‐the past or the far away. Confidence in the epistemic power of photography amplifies the revelation: what is revealed is reality, not an artist's fancy or a side effect of the mechanical imaging process.